<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > introduction</h1>
Director Bong Joon-ho, who won a big victory at this year's Oscars, listed his favorite 30 films in an interview with the media some time ago, including Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's classic work "X Shengzhi ( CURE) " , which is not the first time Bong Joon-ho has expressed his love for this film in public.
For Chinese audiences, "X Sacred Rule" has another famous Chinese translated as "Redemption". Unveiled at the Tokyo Film Festival in 1997, the work, which had almost no horror scenes, is recognized as the pioneering work of Japanese horror films. "X Holy Rule" is a film that is difficult to classify, and in terms of subject matter, it belongs to psychological thrillers such as "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Seven Deadly Sins", but the style and connotation are far from each other. It can be said that Kurosawa Kiyoshi grasped the characteristics of the times, analyzed deep-seated social problems, and used his skillful and stylized lens language to shoot an "atypical" masterpiece that made people's backs chill.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" >01 A pioneering work born out of the double dilemma, social thinking and criticism wrapped in the cloak of terror</h1>
The birth of "X-Seiji" comes from the special background of the creator and the creative environment: on the one hand, the creative dilemma encountered by director Kiyoshi Kurosawa at that time, and on the other hand, a large number of social problems arising after Japan entered the "lost twenty years".
From the beginning of his debut film "Kandagawa Fornication War" in 1983 to the early 1990s, Kurosawa Made Six Commercial Films with Different Themes, both witty comedies and horror films with strange powers, during which he did not find his own style and positioning, and was obsessed with imitating Hollywood and European directors. After filming "Hell Security" in 1992, which imitated "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", Kurosawa Kiyoshi, who had entered a year of confusion, fell into a state of total stagnation in creation, and seeking innovation became the only reason for the director's career to continue.
In Hell's Security, he designed a talking monster, and before the film was finished, he had another idea: Wouldn't it be more interesting to have a monster that could kill people just by talking? After 5 years of concentrating on polishing the script, "X Holy Rule" was born.
The main story of "X-Sunji" is not complicated: the Tokyo Criminal Police High Is ordered to track down a bizarre series of murders, several victims have an "X" symbol engraved on their chests, and although a different perpetrator is caught at the scene of each case, Takabe deduces that the real culprit behind the scene is the same person. With the help of his friend and psychologist Sakuma, Takabe locks down an important suspect: a mysterious young man with superb hypnosis. As the contact with the middle palace increases, the dark side of Gaobu's heart is gradually stimulated, and the identities of the two are exchanged...
The society depicted in "X Holy Rule" is permeated with a sense of hopeless anxiety. The company employee who suddenly smashed his female partner to death, the seemingly kind and diligent patrol officer killed his colleagues, and the female doctor who had suffered from professional and sexist for a long time killed her boss and killed the teacher who jumped off the building after killing his wife. Even the protagonist, the high-ranking police officer, who has been taking care of his wife who is mentally ill for many years, has seen too many dark sides of human nature in his work, and his spirit is always tense. On the surface, they are normal people with complete external personalities, and it is not so much that the inter-palace hypnotizes them, but rather that the inter-palace only stimulates the evil in their hearts and lures out their second personality. When the middle palace performs hypnosis, it is all asking the same sentence: "Who are you?" "This constant confirmation of self-identity is easy to stimulate repressed emotions in the subconscious, and with a little guidance, it will completely explode."
If you just create a horror atmosphere, design a horror effect, or focus on solving the case reasoning, in the horror film itself is also a big country of reasoning in Japan, this kind of movie is too numerous, "X Shengzhi" has been affirmed by the industry, and Bong Joon-ho and other later directors respect, mainly in-depth observation of social issues, in which the social attributes determine the depth of this work.
In the mid-1990s, Japan's housing bubble burst and stagnation brought many problems, class differentiation, and social rift. In March 1995, a sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway train shocked the world by killing 13 people and injuring 6,300 others. In 1997, kobe, a 14-year-old boy killed a child in a row, known as the "Drunken Rose Saint Fight", the murderer left a unique mark on the deceased to provoke the police, this case has many similarities with "X Holy Rule", and the film also repeatedly hints at the connection between religion and hypnosis.
In a conversation with Japanese film scholar Inuhiko Shikata, Kiyoshi Kurosawa said:
"Our generation has been lost between its own needs and the demands of society, and has been looking for its place all our lives."
This is both an individual anxiety and an anxiety in Japanese society. "X Sacred Rule" is not isolated in its exploration of social issues, and then Kurosawa Kiyoshi almost followed the original team to produce "Extraordinary Divine Tree" and "Séance", these films are the continuation of "X Sacred Rule" in terms of content and spirit, if "X Sacred Rule" reflects people's fear of unpredictable things, the last two parts express the repressive pathology of social life.
Suspense and horror are both superficial, and the director tears open the wounds of Japanese society, and the exploration of human nature, nothingness and religion is full of pessimism. The audience can spy on events such as subway sarin and "Drunken Rose Holy Fight", the trauma to the ordinary people of Japan, the need for redemption, what is the need for CURE is not only the character in the movie?
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" >02 Alternative narrative tricks, bloodless horror aesthetics</h1>
"I love the horror of not seeing blood"
This is kurosawa Kiyoshi's words in an interview in 2016, and it is also a summary of his unique personal style of "horror aesthetics", and "X Sacred Rule" takes this concept to the extreme.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa deliberately hid the common sense concepts of horror movies, or simply deleted them. Several of the killings in the case were filmed quite succinctly, two of which were even omitted directly, and we can only know from the conversation of the police, except for only a few seconds of female doctor peeling footage, there is no eye-provoking scene in the whole film. So how does this slow-paced film, which spends most of its time on character dialogue, create a sense of dread?
A narrative ruse that takes a different approach. Ordinary crime movies focus on the preparation of crime or the method and process, but this movie focuses on the most thrilling part on "after the crime happens". The first 20 minutes of the film are cleanly introduced to the plot, the audience quickly knows the murderer and his methods, when the audience thinks that the film is just like this, the director like the palace to the audience "hypnosis", exposing all the parts of the story that should be hidden to the audience, but the most important facts are buried in the fog. The audience thinks that they have seen the whole picture of the story forest, but in fact, it is just a fork in the road, and the audience follows the high-level criminal police to find the way out of the forest, but is completely lost at the shocking end of the movie.
The expression of the combination of virtual and real. The film repeatedly shows the fantasies of the characters, such as when Takabe opens the door after returning home, he sees his mentally ill wife hanged herself, Takabe's expression is twisted and slumped to the ground, and then the camera turns, the wife wakes up the sitting high, and the audience realizes that this is Takabe's hallucination, but this psychological hint is implanted in Takabe and the audience's mind: The death of Takabe's wife is sooner or later. As a psychologist, Sakuma's fantasies came in a more complicated way: he saw the abandoned old residence in the palace, saw the mysterious man in the mental hospital, and saw the ghostly high department coming towards him. This series of shots is intriguing, whether it is Sakuma's fantasy or a flashback of memory, and the boundary between reality and fantasy is blurred.
In addition to the hallucinations of the characters, there are also films that deliberately blur some key plots. Has Sakuma ever actually been to that abandoned house? Was Sakuma's suicide directly related to Takabe? Was Takabe's wife killed after Takabe hypnotized the nurse? These virtual and real plot weaves for the audience to understand by themselves, thus increasing the sense of suspense and horror of the film.
Suspense settings in small nested structures. Many people think that "X Holy Rule" is flat and straightforward, and there is not much brilliance in the structure. In fact, after watching the movie, we will go back to think about a question, which is also the biggest suspense in the whole film: when did the high part begin to be hypnotized by the middle palace? When did you voluntarily become the heir to the Middle House? These two points in time determine whether some of the key episodes that follow actually happen or are hallucinations of the characters. Personally, I think that Takabe was the "missionary" candidate that Mamiya looked for after the first interrogation, and he repeatedly said to Takabe, "You are the one who read me", "You are also a special person, you know from the beginning", and constantly pulled him into the trap of suggestion. The conversation between Takabe and the middle palace in the basement, the high part of the lighter fire as a temptation, and finally by the roof of the strange black water, fire and water symbolize both calm and anger, but also symbolize control and intrusion, from here, the high part is completely controlled by the middle palace.
No matter who he met, he repeatedly asked "Who are you" and repeatedly said that "the inside is empty, and my inside is the outside", and finally ended his painful mission, and Takabe asked after shooting him: "Do you finally remember?" Mamiya died satisfactorily, and they completed the ritual inheritance.
However, the horror of X-Sage is not over, it is constantly linking our real lives through new carriers.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" >03 Metaphor under a highly stylized lens, secondary hypnosis of minimalist audiovisual language</h1>
Cinema is an art of visual plus auditory. - Kiyoshi Kurosawa
The cold and alienated camera language of "X Saint" is very suitable for the atmosphere of the film. The eerie objects that exist in the wilderness are wooden houses surrounded by fog, dark and oppressive mental hospitals, low leaky rooms, and dried monkey corpses engraved with X characters.
He is good at conveying a terrifying atmosphere in ordinary scenes, which stems from the precise grasp of the camera and space. For example, at the beginning of the film, the palace first appears on the seashore, and the nearly 5-minute long-range shot moves sideways with the characters' anxious movements, adding an indescribable sense of anxiety to this desolate and silent picture. In enclosed spaces, such as indoor scenes, the director also likes to pull the camera farther away, the characters are talking at the far end, and the camera is like another person present watching from a distance. Specific locations such as laundromats and wards are a voyeuristic point of view, like someone is monitoring the actions of the characters. These shot schedulings all hide uneasy emotions in everyday images, making the viewer an observer at a distance from the story itself.
The use of space and light complement each other, the change of light and shadow hints at the inner heart of the characters, the most classic shot is the high part slowly approaching the camera from the dark corner, like a ghost, the sense of horror simply overflows the screen.
There is also a technique that Kurosawa Kiyoshi's favorite, that is, the blank space of the lens, not afraid that the audience will not understand it, so that the audience can taste it by themselves. For example, the tragic death of the high wife at the end of the film is one of the most terrifying bridges, but there is only a quick flash of shot, and more shots are left for the expressionless nurses and the dark corridors of the hospital.
The background sound of the film is also amazing, completely simplified, rarely using the soundtrack, and there seems to be an endless noise from beginning to end: the sound of the waves, the gliding of the airplane, the muffled sound of the idling washing machine, the whistling of the wind, the sound of ticking water. In a few scenes, the director eliminates other natural sounds, leaving only the noise of the characters, the arrested suspect slamming his head against the wall to make a dull sound, and the unknown shouting from afar, the contrast is disturbing.
The hum of the film-simulated soundtrack deepened the claustrophobic horror of several major plays, and when the palace was hypnotized, everything fell silent, only his soft words echoed, cold as if from hell. Perhaps it is not only the characters in the play who are hypnotized, but also us in front of the screen.
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > concluding remarks</h1>
Among the contemporary Japanese directors with worldwide fame, Kiyoshi Kurosawa is probably the most underrated and the less well-known in China. His films have been wildly popular in Europe, and his works have been nominated for three major European film festivals and two individual awards at the Cannes Film Festival.
"X Sacred Rule", as his masterpiece, is the pinnacle display of his directorial style and social thinking, and this work has reached a height that not only has Kurosawa Kiyoshi not surpassed himself for more than 20 years, but also becomes the object of imitation by young directors, and the social criticism and philosophical discussion contained in it make this horror film never outdated.
Thanks for reading.